How to Find a Niche that is Profitable using Market Samurai (Part 3/6)

There’s a lot of talk on niche keyword research. In this video, I’m going to attempt to shift your paradigm from what a lot of others have been sharing and show you how to find a niche using a method that I’ve been practicing over the last few years.

I’ve tried about a dozen ways in finding a profitable niche in the past but have settled on this controversial method. Why settle on controversy? Because it’s a whole lot of fun and I’m more interested in creating businesses that will last than ones that will pay out for the short term.

If you watched my last video, then you should know exactly how to use Market Samurai for your keyword research. We’re going to take a step back from the software and get into the nitty gritty of business planning and strategy. I hope to answer how you can find a profitable niche. You may have to sleep on it, but it has worked for me time after time.

Review of Part 2 and Introduction to Part 3

Hopefully by this time, you’ve either downloaded the Market Samurai free trial or you went all out and purchased it. It’s probably a good idea to watch part 2 of my video series if you haven’t already so that you can get a better understanding of how I’m choosing my profitable niche using Market Samurai.

We’re going to get down and dirty into how you can choose a profitable niche that you love and I’ll show you exactly how this can help you make some money! Ultimately, I hope this part gets you excited about building a lasting online business that you will thrive in!

So if you’re ready, let’s dig deep into choosing a profitable niche for your website!

Understanding Adwords Cost Per Click and SEO Value

Alright, so I’ve pumped out some results using Market Samurai in part 2 of my Keyword Research series. I was pretty specific on what I was looking for and that was on a “Market Samurai Tutorial” which I was planning on using for this series that is posted on my blog. We covered the majority of these columns except the AWCPC which is the adwords cost per click, and the SEOV which is the SEO value.

The adwords cost per click is an indication of what you might expect to pay to have your ad appear for a particular keyword in Google. This means that advertisers are willing to pay up to this amount for this specific keyword phrase. The SEOV is Market Samurai’s estimated monthly value of traffic for a website ranked #1 in Google for that specific keyword phrase.

Basically, they take the adwords cost per click value and multiply it by the SEO traffic which is 42% of the number of monthly searches.

This all sounds confusing, so let’s hit up the white board and I’ll draw this out for you.

How Google Adsense/Ad Revenues Works and How Market Samurai Helps

First, we have a person who wants to advertise their website using Google’s services. They would use Google’s program called “Adwords“. Then we have another network of people like you and I who want to make money directly from Google. So we say to Google, “Hey, I’ll put your advertisers’ links on my website if you’ll give me a piece of the pie”. Website owners like you and I enroll into Google’s program called “Adsense“.

Now Google is essentially acting as a broker between them and us.

The advertiser bids on the amount that they are willing to pay if a Google searcher or your website visitor types in a specific keyword phrase, and their advertisement is clicked on and followed through to the advertisers website. Google then pays the website that is hosting the advertisement a piece of that bid amount that they took.

A more simplified way to look at it is:

An advertiser wants to advertise using Google’s Adwords program and places a bid on the maximum amount that they are willing to pay if someone visits their website through the advertisement.

Web visitors see the advertiser’s ad on your website.

If they click through the ad and visit the advertiser’s page, then you get paid through Google Adsense.

So here, if my market samurai posts ranked for the keyword phrase “Keyword Tool”, and I decided to place ads on my website using Google’s Adsense code, and then a visitor came to my website searching in Google for “Keyword Tool”, and then clicked on the ad that they saw, I would get somewhere in the ball park range of $4.34 for the click through. Market Samurai then creates a simple figure called their SEO Value, by taking the AWCPC and multiplying it by the SEO Traffic which is 42% of the searches. This SEO Value figure is based on the entire 42% of people clicking through the advertisement links, which probably won’t happen.

Hopefully, this makes more sense now of how Market Samurai works with showing you where profitable keyword phrases are.

Now these aren’t exactly the most profitable keyword phrases. $4.34 for one click is pretty awesome, but the likelihood of everyone clicking through, let alone, getting ranked as the top spot in Google for this competitive keyword phrase will be quite difficult.

If you look at the other keywords, you can see that there isn’t even an adwords cost per click value, which basically means that it’s not worth much at all or worth nothing!

Before we get into other ways to make money online besides using advertisements, let’s explore another keyword phrase related in the same Niche as MoneyJournal.com – How to make a website.

So I’ve already done the work for this, but as a quick review, here’s what I did in Market Samurai.

I added a new keyword.

Typed in How to make a website.

Set the maximum number on the phrase length to 4 – just so the results would populate faster

generated the keywords

analyzed the keywords using the same filters I used in my last video.

Alright, so I’ve finished analyzing the keywords using Market Samurai’s automation tools and I’ll set the filter to organize it by the SEOV.

You can see right away, that being ranked #1 for Google for the search terms “Website builder” can bring in almost $800,000 in the month from that one keyword phrase alone. So what if you were to rank #1 for these huge keyword phrases? Yes, you could be a millionaire in a month!

But before you get all pumped up, let’s snap back to reality.

You can see that the SEO Competition values are way higher, which means that it’s going to be that much more difficult to compete. Going back to our Market Samurai Tutorial, you can see that the SEO Competition for a keyword phrase like “Online Keyword Research Tool”, is about 8000 whereas the competition on “Website Builder”, is nearly 6 million!

I’ve made this mistake before and focused all of my efforts trying to rank for these giant keyword phrases, but it generally takes a lot of time to rank for these more competitive keyword phrases.

So how do you know if you want to make money using ads or through a different means? Let’s hit the white board again!

Making a Niche Profitable and not the other way around

Ads are obviously a great way to make income, and it’s passive income! You can’t control whether someone will click on your ad or not, but if they do, you essentially made money by just writing some content on your blog and one of your friendly visitors happened to find an advertisement that they found enticing enough to click through. You made $x number of dollars through that.

But there are other ways to make money online without putting a single advertisement on your website.

Different ways to Make your Niche Profitable

First, we have your website. Your website obviously has content whether it’s in the form of information, products, videos, images or basically anything someone can look at and be engaged with. Now you can make money through a ton of different means, but I’ll go over some of the more common ones.

Selling a product or service

Putting up ads or sponsored posts

Membership sites

Affiliate marketing

Drop shipping

The most obvious form of making money online is through selling a product or service.

Selling a Product or Service

Let’s use Market Samurai as an example. We have the Market Samurai website. They sell a product. You buy the product. Then they’ve just made money by selling you their software. Or you have eBay and Amazon where people are able to post their products and you can purchase them at their listed fee.

Another product that people often disregard are e-books. A lot of people have this impression that e-books are just junk, and while some of them aren’t of the best quality, there are some amazing ones out there written by people like you and I.

eBooks are often given for free, but there are others that sell from $1.99 – $49.99 with detailed and organized information on a topic.

Advertisements and Sponsored Posts

I briefly explained to you about advertisements. Google Adsense is not the only ad network where you can make money, but there are tons of other ad networks that work on a similar system. We’ve gone through the Cost Per click model where you put an advertisement on your website, and if a visitor clicks on it, then you get paid a piece of their bid value.

The other common model for advertisements is the cost per impression model. This basically means that if someone even sees your ad as in it completes loading on your website, you get paid again! It sounds amazing, but the cost per impression values are a lot lower than Cost Per Click. So this is more of a volumes game if you have hundreds of thousands or millions of visitors to your website.

Another form of advertisements are “Sponsored ads” or “Sponsored Posts”. With sponsored ads, you’re essentially taking out the middle man out of the equation. Rather than having a company like Google broker the deal, you’re now in direct communication with the advertiser. Payment structures for this style can vary and you have full control of how it works.

Some people choose to go with a pay by the month, meaning your advertisement will be on that person’s site for a month. There are different variables like the location of the ad, the amount of web traffic that site receives each day/week/month and the industry they are in.

Others go by a pay per click or pay per impression which usually incorporates custom or third party softwares that keep track of these.

Sponsored posts can be in the form of blog posts where you would write an article on another company’s website for a fee. This is different from guest blogging as you are paying the blog to write so that you can promote yourself.

Sponsored posts have also moved over to social media! Some people will offer an advertisement on their facebook page or twitter feed and promote your advertisement through one of their social media networks. Again, the variables would be things like the amount of followers, engagement, demographics and niche.

Membership Sites

Membership sites are an awesome way to make residual income. There is generally a price offered for access to exclusive content, a community or web software that you can only have access to for a fee. 2014 has been a huge year where a lot of membership sites have gone with the “Freemium” model. I don’t doubt that 2015 will continue this legacy.

This is basically where you provide a basic user level service for free with limited access to full features. It’s a great model because it allows people to test out what you are offering, and if it’s something that they find useful, they can pay a membership fee to join on a monthly or a reduced annual basis.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing has grown a lot over 2014 as well. Affiliate marketing is when you promote another person or company’s product. The perfect example of affiliate marketing is exactly what I’ve mentioned that I do as part of my strategy for MoneyJournal.com

Since this review is on Market Samurai, I’ve mentioned that by clicking through the link and buying the software, I will get paid a commission for directing the sale to the good people at Market Samurai. People tend to be okay with clicking through the link when the information provided is good quality.

For those of you who have already purchased the software through my affiliate link, thank you for your support and I hope the $52 discount helped you out a bit! Beyond getting a commission, it provides affirmation to me that you’re enjoying what you’re seeing and see the practical uses of Market Samurai. It’s a really encouraging way for affiliate marketers to continue to produce amazing content.

One thing that I want to mention about affiliate marketing is that you shouldn’t be advertising things that you don’t believe in or use. Affiliate marketing built a bad reputation several years ago because people were literally promoting anything that paid a high commission. They would make false claims, and of course, consumers were wickedly angry about that.

I only promote products that I believe in and use myself. If I stop using a product that I’ve promoted in the past, I’m quite open about it all on my blog. With Market Samurai, I’ve been using it since 2012 and I’ve been using it as my primary keyword research tool. It has helped me identify how to find a profitable niche in any industry.

Drop Shipping

Finally, drop shipping. Drop shipping is a lot like selling your own product on your website. You post up pictures and a description on your website which appears to be a product page, and when someone buys the item, you purchase that item from your supplier at a lower cost. Your supplier who owns the product will then ship the item on your behalf as if you are the one who is shipping the product itself. It’s very similar to affiliate marketing, but is a more discrete method to distribute tangible products.

How to Choose a Profitable Niche

So as you can see, there are tons of ways to make money through your niche. You probably feel like I haven’t answered your question yet of how to find a niche using Market Samurai. Market Samurai focuses mostly on potential ad revenues, but I want you to be able to step out of the box a bit.

I’m a huge advocate of producing content on a topic that you’re passionate about. If you can’t think of a specific niche that you’re passionate about like duck hunting, you can start to think on a broader scale.

Just to clarify, you don’t have to have an extreme passion for something to be profitable, but there should be some kind of interest that you have in the topic.

The way that I started MoneyJournal.com was because I realized more than ever that I had a passion in teaching. Rather than starting a blog on teaching how to teach, I thought my expertise would be in a better place if I focused on teaching people something that I had been putting into practice for 7 years! And that was building a business online. I’m not particularly passionate about web development or search engine optimization, but I love creating the strategy behind these things and I can talk about it for hours!

If you’re stuck on something broad like Teaching: then think of topics around that that you’re interested in or that you think you’re good at.

From here, I had some potential ideas. I thought of creating a tech blog since I’ve sold various electronics on eBay doing about a half a million dollar in sales in 9 months, I’ve had just about every popular gadget out there at some point and I enjoy talking about them.

Then I thought about teaching strategy in board games and reviewing new board games.

The problem with these two were that I knew that I liked them a lot, but I didn’t see it providing the same value as I could if I were to teach people how to build a business online.

Then my thoughts of starting an online consulting company for start ups came up. There is obviously a lot of potential to do business consulting gigs for web start ups, but it didn’t quite sit well with me.

One thing that I’m driven by in life is being able to make an impact on others’ lives. By teaching others how to be your own boss, set your own hours and work from the comfort of your own home seemed like the only viable option.

I have been privileged to be able to work from home or my own distribution warehouse throughout the past 7 years, and I wanted to be able to provide an opportunity for others to do what they wanted to do for work. So, putting the pieces together from my passions/interests and drive:

teaching

start ups

web strategy

wanting to be able to help others start their own online businesses

I fell into what became moneyjournal.com

In hindsight, things might seem obvious as to why I chose moneyjournal.com since I’ve laid it out for you like this, but at the time, it wasn’t easy.

What is a Profitable Niche?

Finding a profitable niche can honestly be anything where there is a gap in the industry and you believe you can fill that gap. With the abundant amount of ways to make money, you can incorporate those into your strategy after you find out where you will want to stick around. A lot of you might disagree with me, but from about 50 web projects that I’ve created, only a dozen or so are still around. I abandoned most that I had no interest in pre-launch, and the ones that I happened to get off the ground, there was no momentum in the ones that I wasn’t interested in.

With the ones that I am interested in, I was able to keep going even when things didn’t seem like they were working out.

How to do your Niche Research

Choose your passion/interests/likes, but more importantly, something that drives you. Passion and interests are a catalyst to building drive. Drive will actually get you places.